Guide to Ongoing Formation for Priests

CHAPTER 2: ONGOING FORMATION | 37

and to the Church. 72 Nevertheless, midlife is not a period of life to be ignored; the support of others, including the advice of older priests, will help priests at this age to emerge from the crisis more confident and peaceful than ever. In middle age, men must also begin to pay more attention to their physical health. Without becoming fastidious, priests need to make reason able efforts to remain fit and healthy through good nutrition, exercise, wholesome habits, and sufficient sleep. Healthy aging begins in these years; efforts should include regular physicals and proper medical care. Ongoing formation helps priests anticipate, manage, and gracefully cope with these natural changes. 99. 100. A stage of life that is sometimes overlooked in discussions of ongoing formation is that of senior clergy. The transition into an older age group, often away from formal administrative duties, is a life change as serious as any other. Some senior priests continue to live in a rectory or other forms of common priestly life; others choose to live on their own. Many priests eventually need to move into an assisted living facility. Priests, however, do not retire, even when required to resign their office due to age. 73 Their new status simply means a change in their pastoral ministry. In their daily Mass and prayer, for which they have perhaps more opportunity and leisure, senior priests can do immeasurable good for the Church at large and for their fellow priests still in the field. They have an opportunity “to deepen the contemplative sense of the priestly life, rediscover and savor the doctrinal treasures of what they have already studied, and feel they are useful, as they rightly are, insofar as being of utmost value in suitable forms of true and proper ministry, especially as expert confessors and spiritual directors.” 74 101. SENIOR AND “RETIRED” CLERGY

72 “They [that is, middle-aged priests] need encouragement, intelligent appreciation and enhancement, and a new deepening of formation in all its dimensions in order to rethink themselves and what they do; to reawaken the motivations underlying the sacred ministry; to do serious thinking about pastoral methods in the light of what is essential, communion among priests of the presbyterate, and friendship with the Bishop; to surmount any sense of exhaustion, frustration and solitude; to rediscover the wellsprings of the priestly spirituality.” DMLP, no. 112. 73 See CIC, c. 538 §3. 74 DMLP, no. 113.